


Eighty Days

by Anonymous



Series: Write drunk, edit sober. [2]
Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters: X & Y | Pokemon X & Y Versions
Genre: Alcohol, Guaranteed happy ending for all, M/M, Vomit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-31
Updated: 2013-12-31
Packaged: 2018-01-08 03:27:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1127803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It has been three months. Specifically, eighty days. October twelfth to December thirty first.</p><p>Eighty days since the man Augustine Sycamore had idolized almost as much as he trusted had gone mad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eighty Days

It had been three months. Specifically, eighty days. Long enough for new neural connections between memory and current thought processing to be made. Long enough that he didn't wake up every morning having forgotten, and being forced to remember all over again.

The pain was a dull thud in the back of his mind, and he tried to pay it no attention. He didn’t even count the days. He didn’t. It was just that, given how much of his life was numbers, it was so easy to calculate on the fly. October twelfth to December thirty first.

Eighty days since the man Augustine Sycamore had idolized almost as much as he trusted had gone mad. 

No. Since Lysandre had revealed that madness, which had always been there. It was so  _easy_  to see it, in retrospect. But that was the power of hindsight.

Not having to remember actively at the first brush of conscious breath against his sleeping mind didn’t mean he was exempt from recollecting throughout the rest of every waking moment.

Little things, stupid, pointless things would punch the air from his lungs with sudden shocks of memory until he learned not to do them anymore. Contact books updated so that searching for Mme Lyon did not require sliding past a rather more inflammatory name. Consciously avoiding the Magenta plaza, navigating around Autumnal whenever possible, and always anxious about Estival. Ordering his espresso black rather than with cream, no matter the hour or the level of his exhaustion, because café noisette had been the only vice Sycamore had ever seen him indulge in.

Except, of course, for wild, maniacal genocide.

The green, glassy bottom of the second bottle of cheap, acerbic wine filled his gaze, as he considered the labs around him. They were empty, as they had been throughout the day. Holidays days were sacred in Kalos, and there was no reason for his staff to be in this late even on a workday. The muted hum of the more advanced equipment plugging away on the second floor was the only harmony for his shaky breathing and the vague notion that he could hear his own pulse.

There were two hours (two bottles) left until the new year. The first year since his return from Sinnoh that would be spent without Lysandre’s company. Perhaps that was for the best. He had been a cold and callous man, ever formal, constantly brushing things aside in his eternal self confidence. He had not been, in truth, a very good friend. But Sycamore was caring and cheerful enough for them both.

Only he hadn’t been.

"That was the entire problem, wasn’t it?" He asked of the matched set of wineglasses that had been his Christmas gift four years past. There were five. One in each of the plazas’ colors, and horrifically childish considering Lysandre’s tastes, but entirely to Sycamore’s liking. They were insistently inanimate, and had no answers for him, no matter how many times he filled and emptied their various bowls.

But never from the red-violet one. Blue, green, red, yellow, blue. Five glasses to a bottle. Five plazas to a city. Had it ever annoyed Lysandre, being unable to build his café (his labs, his deathtrap, his hellish maze of plotting and murder) in the plaza rouge? Pink-purple did not seem the sort of color that he would have associated himself with willingly. Although, Mienshao perhaps suggested otherwise. 

"Something about elegance and royalty, probably." Sycamore muttered into the empty blue glass. Eventually, he was going to have to open the last bottle. But right now, it seemed like a titanic effort, not worth the prize of blacking himself out into a stupor.

What a ridiculous sight he must have made.

The clock ticked over to 23h00. By now, if he could be bothered to open the windows, people would be audible from every home in Lumiose. Every apartment and café, bar and club, spilling out locals and travellers from all corners of imagination. All joined in the common goal of celebrating the end of the old, the shine of the new. No doubt a significant percentage of them were desperately thankful that there was a new year to be celebrated, with their lives were in tact and continuing.

A dozen superstitions surrounded the moment they were all waiting for. A kiss for luck, a clean home for health, a party for fraternity, a meal for family, a toast for wealth. And there were others, of course. Less sterile, learned not around brightly lit kitchen tables, but in the dark alleys full of grumbling teenagers. If you were fucking when the year switched over, then you’d never hit a dry streak in all the coming twelve months. If you caught your secret love’s lips on that moment, the fates would conspire to tie you together, tight, and red, and spit-slick longing.

The fourth bottle, and its damnable cork, had begun to seem like a more reasonable challenge with every passing moment. But he was drunk and maudlin, and his thoughts stilled his hands every minute or two, until there were fifteen left and the bottle was still there, sealed and waiting.

He was beginning to regret not bringing some bread with him. Something to calm a roiling stomach, driven to churning by directionless hate and angst that no amount of wine would make seem less foolish. And, of course, there was the wine itself. Bitter, stinging, cheap and strong. Too much for most twenty somethings, to say nothing of a man closer to forty than thirty, who should have known better, by now, than to do this to himself.

It would only get worse through the morning (the year).

The dizzy haze of self deprecation felt too much like sleeping, when the chime of the elevator jerked him to attention.

"Allez-vous, Sonia." He managed, though by the time he had convinced his cottony tongue to move around the syllables, his lab assistant’s quiet footsteps were already nearing the edge of the partition. "You, you have. I don’t know. Better parties to attend than this."

He should have probably at least  _tried_  to clear his desk off, with its tipped over glasses and little legion of bottom shelf wine bottles. She was only twenty four, and he was supposed to be a mentor and a role model, not an example of pickling a liver in a stupid gambit to punish an unknown target.

Instead he let his forehead meet the muddled papers on the desk, and tried not to think about the fact that the oil and drunk sweat on his skin would no doubt render the top leaf or two translucent and require new copies to be made. For the life of him, he couldn't recall what they were about.

The sigh that met his ears was not followed immediately by fretting noises, nor by cool, thin fingers rendered bloodless by too many years of typing and clipboards. Just a heavy exhalation of air, dripping with disappointment.

"I told you to go," He managed, in a tone that might have sounded joking, if it weren’t layered with such a thick slur.

"You did no such thing." Sonia’s voice had deepened and roughed and gone into a man’s, and for a moment, Sycamore found himself wondering blindly if perhaps he had been drinking something other than wine, because he was hallucinating vividly now, surely.

Peeling his head up from the desk was as difficult as anything he had ever done in his life, and he could not be quite sure it was worth the effort. The first glimpse of that familiar, ridiculously large silhouette, even without the matching crown of hair, was enough to send his stomach into freefall.

Which, given the amount of drinking he had been doing, was not necessarily the  _best_  outcome.

He oozed bonelessly out of his chair and under his desk, curling around the wastepaper basket underneath just in time to keep himself from choking up violently dark streams of wine all over his own carpet.

The heaving took its time in settling, long enough for a new layer of sweat to cool and leave him feeling tacky and filthy. Long enough for his mind to circle back around to the vision that brought him to this point a little more carefully.

The wastebin reeked of cheap alcohol and bile, and it was going to sink into his clothes soon, which was a perfectly reasonable, rational motivation for hauling himself up again. Moreso than imaginary dead men, certainly. His fingers wrapped over the edge of the desk to lift and steady him.

It proved unnecessary, when a single large hand clutched the back of his shirt and did the lifting for him. It felt suspiciously like teleporting, the journey from curled on his knees to standing tall. And Sycamore was tall. He loomed like a slender, wavering tree over most of the others in his lab, in his  _city_. But he had to tip his head back, dizzy with how unusual the gesture was, to find the face of his rescuer.

Having been prepared for it this time, it was less traumatic. Thus, it was easier to seek out the differences, the things that made this vision more real. If he were dreaming, he would dream of the Lysandre he used to take lunch with in the café Soleil. Or he would dream of the empty  _thing_  that announced everyone was going to die at its mercy, as if that was a gift.

That was an irrefutable fact, not speculative conjecture. These were dreams he had been having for seventy nine nights straight.

But the giant before him was not someone that Sycamore knew, save for all the ways in which he did. The same shoulders, the same stance, the same expression of vague disappointment, as if his dear friend has somehow let him down  _again_  simply by being what he was. No one could stoically disapprove of excessive public emotion quite like Lysandre.

But his hair was shorn tight and dyed brown. His jaw was as cleanly shaven as it had been in their earliest days together in the university, though stronger now with age. His nose had clearly been broken and poorly set, and his eyes…

"You’ve gotten contacts." 

It took a long, long time for Lysandre to respond to that, but the past three months had done nothing to dull Sycamore’s familiarity with the tight, subtle expressions on his features, and the words were coming. Sycamore could feel them in the roots of his hair and the back of his neck.

"I suppose that is a better response than choking on your own stom-"

The window was still closed, which was a mercy in its way, because Lumiose on New Year’s Eve could be brutally cold if one was not surrounded by two dozen other revellers, moving in roaming packs of heat and cheer in the streets.

But they were in the streets, and when an entire city screams out in celebration at the same moment, merely being on the third floor wasn’t enough to deaden the sound. It swallowed up Lysandre’s words easily, and the befuddled, split-spiralling cloud of thoughts that existed beneath the haze of alcohol in Sycamore’s head caught on to an idea that had struck him some time ago. Hours. Minutes. Who could say? Certainly not himself.

It wasn’t until he had thrown himself, wobbling and imprecise, up to catch Lysandre’s lips (pursed tight and red but not spit-slick longing) that he considered the fact that he was filthy and stinking and not a full two minutes ago had been vomiting heavily. He’d been on the receiving end of kisses like that, and they were never as pleasant as the instigator seemed to think they should be.

The fact that Lysandre did not immediately pull him off in disgust, he thought muddily, was probably significant. There was a meaning there that he should pay attention to.

But he didn’t want to pay attention to thoughts about Lysandre. He’d trained himself away from it. And even if he hadn’t, there would be no point now. Not with Lysandre’s hand delicately pulling at Sycamore’s chin, separating their mouths with only the minimum requisite grimace. Caught somewhere between obedient and rebellious, Sycamore followed the silent command just far enough to bury himself in Lysandre’s neck instead. It was at a more comfortable height, anyway.

The weight of Lysandre’s jaw atop his hair suggested, perhaps, that this was the correct move. 

"I didn’t. I. I didn’t realize." It was so difficult to speak like this, swimming through a sea of exhaustion and confusion that he had begun to realize, as one does when too drunk to be fooled by one’s own machinations, was only half the wine’s fault. He could let himself feel it now. The empty, aching grief that he had hidden behind work and holidays and friends. Because it was a small thing, compared to the enormous man he was clinging to like an ethyl soaked limpet. His throat felt tight and hoarse with the realization; he may have been be crying. It was hard to say. "I didn’t know I would. I would miss you. That much."

"No," Came the matching response, and he could feel the words bubbling up from Lysandre’s chest, which was moving and breathing and  _alive_. He could feel them, and it was a luxury he had never had, and had assumed was lost, if he’d ever let himself think on it at all. “I did not expect such an absence would prove so difficult, either.”

"You can’t, you. You can’t kill everyone again." Sycamore was distantly aware that he sounded like a pleading child begging for nonsense things, but at this point, had he not earned the right? He could let himself be embarrassed by it in the morning. "And you can’t leave."

"Well I certainly can’t stay here."

Because it was available, and because there was a spitefulness still lurking beneath all the aching and the confusion and the relief, Sycamore’s entirely reasonable response to that statement was to bite down on the junction of Lysandre’s neck with a ferocity that he could not help imagining his Garchomp would be proud of.

It did not achieve the intended response.

Given how often he had done the same thing to other people, perhaps he ought to have known better.

"Tomorrow," Sycamore demanded, words muffled and spoken directly into Lysandre’s neck. "You can tell me all. All about how you are a, a wanted man and you have to be. In. In hiding or whatever  _tomorrow_. When I’m not. When I can think in lines again. And. And when I’m not. Here. Doing this. You’re distracting. Why are you so damned distracting? Months, you know. You and your. Hair.  _Your hair_.”

And he carried on like that, for quite some time, unable to control his mouth in either direction. He could no more stop speaking than make the words come out smoothly.

He had to lean himself against Lysandre’s side all the way to his apartments. What little available brain power he might have had for things like balance and walking had long since been routed into talking and  _Lysandre_.

Every once in a while, when he stumbled on a particularly tricky bit of the road, or when a snatch of farewells and music from a briefly opened door reached him, he wondered if this was a particularly vivid dream, or some sort of stupid, poorly thought out New Year’s gift. Either way, Lysandre would be gone in the morning.

He hoped, before the thoughts filtered away in the stream of his consciousness, that he was wrong about that.

And he was.

**Author's Note:**

> I received two requests to crosspost my dumb lysyc fics to AO3 for archiving so I guess standby there's like three of them. Although, admittedly, the hair thing gets me every time.


End file.
